Government and Politics

The primary reasons for citing sources when presenting research are:

• to give credit to the authors whose work you have drawn upon, and  
• to allow readers to track down your sources, should they wish to do so. 

​There are many style guides for formatting citations and creating bibliographies. The major styles are:

• MLA Style, from the Modern Language Association;
• APA Style, from the American Psychological Association, and 
• Chicago Style, from the University of Chicago Press

These tools allow you to gather citations and PDFs in one place and then quickly create a reference list and/or bibliography. It is best to install these tools at the start of your research.